The Three Dons

Don Carlos, Don Fernando and Don Salvador. They often played dominoes together, seated around a table in the shade of a palm tree. Or chatted over a glass of wine in a bar, snacking on jamón serrano, the famous Spanish cured ham which comes in expensive and distressingly thin slices.

Don and doña are terms of respect in Spanish, courtesy titles, much superior to the plain old señor and señora which simply mean Mr and Mrs. You can ascend to the title don or doña in various ways. The simplest is to open an account with an electricity company, because their monthly bills will address you thus. But this is just commercial toadying and not to be taken seriously.

More convincing is another common method, which is to become very old - or even more reliably, to die, when the obituaries in the local newspaper will award you the title posthumously.

Far more appealing as an approach, although much less easy to achieve, is to have lots of money. Our Three Dons all had lots of money.

We got to know Don Carlos on the beach. While we swam he walked briskly up and down the tideline in the sunshine, a dignified figure in bathing shorts and a big, prosperous belly. From initially nodding cheerfully to each other we progressed to pausing for a word or two, and gradually we learned a little more about him. Born on the island, he still owned property here but had married into business interests and a different way of life on the Península, the Spanish mainland. 'I come back here to relax,' he told us. 'Un pequeño paraíso.' A little Paradise. No argument there.

Don Carlos had a heart problem and had been told to take gentle exercise. The problem was something to do with swollen blood vessels - let's not be too gory - and although it was operable, the cardiologist had warned him there was a one-in-three chance of failure. 'One in three chances that they'll kill me!' he roared, outraged. Two in three that they wouldn't, then, but Don Carlos was clearly not a gambler and had decided just to cross his fingers and keep walking.

Maybe his friend Don Salvador played some role in this decision. He was a pharmacist, addressed as don perhaps from respect for his expertise, or his age, or more probably because like Don Carlos he had inherited property. By the time we met him he had retired, but he still lent a hand now and again in the pharmacy.

I went there one day with a sore back to ask if he knew anyone who could massage it better. 'There's a curandero,' replied Don Salvador, shrugging eloquently. A curandero is someone who claims to heal without being conventionally qualified.

Don Salvador could have tried to sell me pain-relief pills, but it turned out he also suffered from back pain and as a fellow sufferer, he showed me his cost-free solution. 'Look,' he said, coming around to the front of the counter. 'The best way to treat a sore back is this.'

Bending his legs, he leaned backwards against the edge of the counter, positioning it between two of the knobbles of his spine. Then he leaned back a little further and wriggled, like a brown bear rubbing its back on a pine trunk. 'Like this, you see?' Rising a little to position the counter edge between the next two knobbles, he wriggled again. Whether it was doing any good I've no idea but he was clearly enjoying it.

A while ago the town council installed some bright yellow exercise machines near the beach, one of which has a big rubber roller that achieves much the same effect. Any brown bear would love it.






And then there was Don Fernando. Who had a secret.

We got to know him a little better than the others through chatting in the bar of the Club Náutico, the Nautical Club, a pleasant venue half buried in a cave and not as grand as it sounds. 'We call you people the golondrinas,' he told us. The swallows, who arrive in winter and depart in spring, until some of us forget to fly off again.

A man of wit and wisdom, and also of great patience, Don Fernando listened to our baby Spanish with elegant politeness rather than hysterical laughter and occasionally helped us climb over a pronunciation hurdle. I can still hear and see him demonstrating Archipiélago Canario, the Canarian Archipelago, leaning forward for emphasis: 'Arr-chee-pee-AY-lago!'

Like his two friends, Don Fernando owned land and property, including a large farm in one of the island's many valleys where he, or rather his handful of loyal workers, grew bananas on a commercial scale. And avocados, oranges, grapes, apricots... anything will grow in this rich, volcanic soil, you just have to throw down a pip, spray a little water and stand back.

He invited us to call into the farm one day, which of course we did. 'Have a banana!' A banana picked yellow from the growing bunch is a revelation, rare and wonderful. For export the bunches are cut down while still green, because if you try to transport bananas already yellow they arrive looking like discarded work gloves from an oil rig.

At this stage Don Fernando didn't know us well enough to confess his secret. That came later, over a glass of wine or two in a restaurant. Eccentricity being not only permitted but expected of a don, he drank his wine from an ordinary glass tumbler as used for water: 'Much better than any wine glass, look at all that air above it for the bouquet!'

As our conversation progressed from the humdrum to deeper probings and the broader-sweep stuff about work, life and the Universe, he suddenly became pensive. 'Luck plays a big part in life.'

'Well yes, but you have to…'

'Do you know,' continued Don Fernando, lowering his voice, 'how I came to own my farm, all that land?' We had assumed it was inherited, but he shook his head. 'I have my wife to thank for that.'

'Ah, so the land was hers and…'

'No. I won the lottery. A big prize, mucho, muchísimo.' He mimed a huge bag of money, golden doubloons. 'I'd have spent the lot, wasted it,' he admitted with endearing honesty. 'Fortunately my wife had more sense and insisted I buy land. I couldn't see the point, but she was right. Look at it now.'

He topped up our glasses from the bottle. 'Sensible woman. Here's to my wife.' We clinked glasses.

'And also to health - salud! And happiness - felicidad!' And while we're at it, let's add luck as well - suerte! When you think about it, all you really need is luck.


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A postscript for the pernickety
In English we capitalise the titles Don and Doña, whereas in Spanish they do not. Nor do they capitalise our Sir and Dame, which looks a bit odd, as in 'sir Francis Drake' or 'dame Maggie Smith'.

Whatever happened to Sebastian?

Foreign visitors, seeing things with fresh eyes and holiday-sharpened curiosity, are inclined to ask difficult questions. There is plenty of material here for difficult questions, just in the capital San Sebastián itself. For example:

What's that big tower thing in the park?
The first serious footprint of the Spanish Conquistadores - a military fort built around 1450 as a refuge against attacks by the island's native population, the guanches. (This turned out to be a sensible precaution.)

Who is Cristóbal Colón, and why is there so much fuss about him here?
The adventurer we know as Christopher Columbus, for whom La Gomera was the last port of call before sailing on to discover the Americas. Mind you, he discovered them many thousands of years later than the people already living there. And local tittle-tattle claims that while staying in La Gomera he launched a torrid affair with a certain Beatriz de Bobadilla, who at that time ruled the island in a style much like Margaret Thatcher's.

We now have trained tour guides able to cope with all this stuff, but it's the off-the-cuff questions for the rest of us that cause problems. A foreign visitor who really stirred things up many years ago was my mother, who had spread her winter wings to join us for a couple of weeks. On a visit to view the effigy of San Sebastián (Saint Sebastian) in his little chapel, she spotted the one thing that's really strange about him and that nobody here ever mentions. (Actually there are two strangenesses, but I'll come to the second one later.)

We couldn't answer her question ourselves so later that day, while chatting to our neighbour Isabel in the evening sunshine, we asked her what she knew about Saint Sebastian.

'He's the santo patrón, the patron saint of the town.' Well yes, but what we really wanted to know - what my mother wanted to know - was why he'd got little arrows stuck all over him.

Isabel was a genuine dyed-in-the-wool Gomeran, born in the village and lived here all her life, but this was something she'd never thought about. Couldn't explain it. No idea.

She called up reinforcements in the shape of her husband Víctor who was sitting in the shade cutting seed potatoes into single-eyed pieces. He too could shed no light on Saint Sebastian's arrows, and didn't seem too bothered about it. But the fact is that no Spaniard, and still less a Canarian, finds it easy to admit they don't know something then just let it go. At the very least they will have an opinion, inventing one on the spot if necessary.

'Has to be something to do with South America,' Víctor decided. 'The Indians. He was a missionary in South America and got killed by natives with bows and arrows. Obviously. No?'

He looked at us for approval of this scenario. A very likely one: many Catholic missionaries came to grief one way or another in the Americas. Many others made vast fortunes one way or another in the Americas, but that's a different issue.

'Venezuela,' Víctor added, fleshing out the theory.

'They don't have Indians in Venezuela,' objected his wife. Many Gomerans still have relatives in Caracas, descendants of those who fled there during the long, terrible years of the Franco regime, and none of them have ever ended up pierced with arrows.

Víctor waved a seed potato dismissively. 'Well, wherever. Colombia. Peru. Ask the priest.'

In those days there was a weekly service in our village's chapel, an evening Mass, and my mother had already decided she would like to take part. She couldn't speak a word of Spanish but was very good at smiling, which is really all you need in order to make friends. Neither had she been to a Catholic Mass before, but the local ladies took charge of her and presumably (I wasn't there) prompted her to stand, sit or kneel as necessary. Judging by the photo I took of them all afterwards, she had a great time.

The priest was able to speak to her in English, which must have greatly impressed his little flock, but it was a big mistake because this evident rapport emboldened Isabel to ask the question: 'This lady wants to know why Saint Sebastian has got arrows stuck all over him.'

I suspect that the priest wasn't altogether sure of his ground about this. He reportedly fielded the question to the other ladies and was duly shocked when it turned out that none of them had the faintest idea. They tried a few guesses, the consensus favouring Víctor's South American theory. Sebastian had achieved his martyrdom as a missionary in the dark, dangerous rainforests of the Americas.

No. This would not do, the priest scolded. This would not do at all! Saint Sebastian was the patron saint of the island's capital yet nobody in this village knew what had happened to him? He promised to give them a sermon about it the following week. (Which - I'm being unkind! - would give him chance to refresh his memory about the details. I recall this ploy from my early incarnation as a teacher.)

By the time he gave his sermon my Mum had already flown back to the British winter, and when we asked our neighbours about it they had forgotten much of what the priest had told them. But in brief, it had nothing to do with South America. It was all the fault of the Romans and was actually a little less romantic than the arrows suggest. For those with a thirst for knowledge I have appended a summary below.

But equally interesting is the other strangeness about Saint Sebastian. We got this from a volunteer guide in a church in Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the north of Spain, which houses effigies not only of Sebastian but of many others of his saintly companions.

Here it is: San Sebastián is the only Catholic saint to be depicted near-naked, apart from Jesus Christ himself. He wears a modest loincloth, a bit of drapery, but nothing else. Some versions have him handsome and virile in Michelangelo style, while in others he appears more vulnerable and approachable. Our local version is - well, almost cuddly, and the arrows don't seem to hurt at all. Perfectly suited to the island he lives on, and what can be wrong with that?


The legend of Saint Sebastian
A slightly mysterious figure, Saint Sebastian. Nobody seems to know much about his early years except that he may have been born in southern France but was educated in Milan. He joined the Roman army in 283 AD (I've no idea how we know this so precisely) and did so well at soldiering that he was promoted to the Praetorian Guard of Emperor Diocletian.

Unfortunately, Sebastian was also a clandestine evangelist who converted many of his comrades and local dignitaries to Christianity. Emperor Diocletian was notoriously intolerant of Christians and when he found out, he sentenced Sebastian to an exemplary punishment: he was roped to a stake and used for target practice by the archers.

Astonishingly, although riddled with arrows he survived and was rescued by a fellow Christian, a woman called Irene, who nursed him back to health. So far so good, but at this point the story turns even uglier. Once recovered, Sebastian boldly but foolishly confronted Diocletian in public, haranguing him for his persecution of Christians. The emperor had him clubbed to death, this time successfully, and his body was thrown into the Roman sewers.

Another Christian woman, Lucina, recovered the corpse and he ended up decently buried in the catacombs beneath Rome, from where, some time later, the remains were distributed as relics to various Catholic sites around Europe.

Sebastian is now the patron saint of soldiers, athletes and - bizarrely - archers. He is also credited with protective powers against the plague, which derives from ancient beliefs that this disease was hurled down as arrows from the sky by angry gods. Sometimes these things get a bit muddled.